Dark Eden (49 page)

‘We could do that,’ I said to Jeff, after a bit. ‘We could sew up skins and make something like that to break our fall.’

That made him laugh. He laughed and laughed, until even I couldn’t help smiling.

‘I never give it a rest, yeah? Is that what you’re thinking?’

‘No, you bloody don’t, John. It’s like everything in the world is just stuff for you to use for your plans.’

He carried on stroking Def, and watching the water dropping down through the steam.

‘And anyway, how would we get back out again?’ he said after a bit.

‘We could make ropes.’

This made him laugh again.

‘Big big ropes they’d have to be.’

The woollybuck groaned and snorted, and Jeff turned to attend to it. I leaned over the edge to look straight down. The steam had cleared a bit again, and I could see those shining trees again, way way down below: red and blue and yellow. And then I saw something moving down there, a row of ten twelve red lights weaving through the lights of the trees.

‘Jeff! Quick! Look!’

But steam blew back before Jeff had a chance to turn away from Def, and when it next cleared the moving lights had gone. It was only me that saw that long long creature winding its way through the trees.

‘What did you see?’

‘Just those trees down there again,’ I said.

Suddenly I jumped to my feet with a gasp and backed away from that dreadful hole. It was weird. I was shaking. It was like it had almost sucked me in.

‘What’s the matter, John?’

‘I don’t like this place.’

‘This hole, do you mean? Or Tall Tree Valley?’

‘Neither.’

‘You really don’t, do you?’

Still standing with Def by the edge of the hole, Jeff looked back at me and smiled.

It was horrible to think that, even for a moment, I’d suggested we might go down into that hole. It was like Underworld had been trying to trick me, to suck me away from sky and Earth.

‘We can’t stay here, Jeff. We’ll have to go back up on Dark and carry on to other side.’

‘No one will go up Dark with you now, John,’ Jeff said, climbing back onto Def’s back. ‘Not even Gerry.’

I pulled off Gela’s ring and started to twist and turn it between my fingers.

‘Okay, so I’ll just have to wait till the time’s right. But we can’t stay here forever, Jeff. We can’t!’

He didn’t answer. He just watched my fingers playing with Gela’s ring.

After a bit, feeling calmer, I passed it to him to hold. He studied it for a few seconds and then handed it straight back to me, the ring that Angela was given on Earth by her mother and father, like it was nothing more than a nice stone or a pretty bit of shell.

‘If we were there on Earth,’ he said, ‘then we’d call Earth
here
, and it would be the ordinary dull place we were stuck in, and Eden would be the strange wonderful place that was far far away.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘I mean, wherever you are, that’s here, and that’s the only place you can be. Here or nowhere.’

I put the ring back on my finger.

Another monkey pushed a stone to the edge of the hole and dropped down through the steam.

‘Are you with me, Jeff?’ I asked.

Jeff laughed.

‘Yeah, of course I am.’

‘No, I mean are you on my side?’

‘Your
side
?’

I could see straight away that it wasn’t the right question to ask him. I always wanted to narrow things down, shut things out, concentrate all my effort on one point so as to get things done, but Jeff was the opposite of that. He was always reminding himself to lift his eyes from the things we all got absorbed in, and to see the wide world beyond. He’d never settle for seeing only one side of a thing.

‘I mean, are we friends?’ I finally asked lamely.

This made him laugh and laugh.

Then we heard a scared cry from back where the others were. We hurried back to find that Julie Blueside’s baby was on its way.

It took two whole wakings for Julie’s baby to be born. It seemed to be stuck inside her, no matter how hard she pushed, and she screamed and screamed, and we all thought she was going to die. There were oldmums back in Family who knew how to help with things like that, but none of us did. None of us had any idea. Everyone cowered down inside themselves while Julie screamed and screamed and screamed, and even while I tried to comfort and reassure her, I felt my own baby growing inside me, and wondered if this was going to be how I died too.

And then something shifted somehow, and the baby came out. It was a tiny tiny little batfaced boy and it was dead and blue and shrivelled up. Another death to add to Suzie’s and her baby’s and make Tall Tree seem even more like a place of loneliness and sadness, however much we all tried to tell each other that it was fine.

After we’d buried the baby under stones, we stayed up by that stream at the edge of forest for a couple of wakings. Then Tina and me persuaded everyone to move further down into forest and we all built shelters and a new fence down there next to a small pool.

Me and Tina pretty much ran things after that, just like we’d done back at Valley Neck. John might have been the one that brought us here, but now he was busy busy again with his own things: trips up to edge of Dark, sewing new wraps and greasing them and storing them in logs, cutting new snowboots from bark, drying wavyweed and twisting ropes, trying out new kinds of footwrap with different mixtures of grease and sap and buckfoot glue.

We’d been living there for some time – two three periods – when we heard the lookouts calling out during a sleep, and crawled out of our shelters to find snow falling. It fell and fell and fell all across Tall Tree Valley, until the ground was white with snow everywhere, and the lanterns on the trees shone out through lumps of snow, and icy water came drip-drip-dripping from every branch as the snow melted on the warm bark. Even when snow had covered everything, it still kept falling falling from the black sky, until it lay two three feet deep, and our shelters were smooth white heaps. A couple of them collapsed under the weight.

‘Snow! Snow! I hate cold snow,’ whimpered Harry Spiketree. ‘Why won’t it stop? I’m scared. Why won’t it go away?’

As usual people yelled at him to shut up, but really all Harry ever did was say out loud what everyone felt inside. It
was
scary. I thought so too. It was like we’d come down here to this dismal bloody place to get away from Snowy Dark, but now Dark was following after us.

We built up our main fire quickly, before the snow could put it out, dragging logs out from under the snow that had covered our big log pile, and then we huddled round the flames with greased buckskins over our heads, trying to keep as warm and dry as we could.

I felt something squirm inside me. It was the little baby in my womb. My first baby.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘It’s started to …’

But I never finished telling them. A cry had come from somewhere on the slopes above us.

Aaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaah!

A snow leopard. Gela’s heart! Lucy London burst into tears, and quite a few of the others began to sob and moan and rock.

‘We’ll be alright,’ I told everyone. ‘We’ll be alright. Even forest leopards don’t like fire, do they?’

‘That’s right,’ Tina said straight away. ‘And snow leopards aren’t used to
any
sort of light, are they? So they’ll be even more scared if anything’

We were
trying
to be cheerful, but weirdly John suddenly seemed like he
really was
happy happy.

‘Snow. Cold. Leopards,’ he said cheerfully, jumping up to get more wood for the fire. ‘It’s like Dark’s come down to get us, isn’t it? It’s like we haven’t really got away from it at all.’

He chucked a log onto the flames and looked around at us with a big smile on his face.

‘The fire
should
scare them away,’ he said, ‘but better get a few bows and spears ready, just in case, eh?’

The slinker! He was hoping that this would put us all off Tall Tree Valley for good.

Actually, even though I’d felt scared at first, I didn’t think the snow would really harm us. Even back in Circle Valley it happened occasionally that snow fell, and sometimes it even settled for a waking or two in forest on slopes of Blue Mountains or Peckham Hills. I guessed it would be the same here. It wasn’t going to be fun, but we wouldn’t freeze. We had a huge pile of wood to burn and keep us warm till the snow had passed, and we had a fence round us, and I’d never heard of any animal that would come close to a big fire.

‘Trouble with Tall Tree Valley,’ John said, ‘is that it’s still in Dark. It’s not really so different from that place up there where we saw the giant slinker: just a little warm patch in middle of Snowy Dark. We won’t
really
get away from Dark until we’re right across and down the other side.’

If he’d said that a waking earlier, we’d have all been mad at him, but now, our shelters buried and leopards wailing on the slopes, I could see people listening to him and thinking and taking it in, and I could see them remembering all the things that they didn’t like about small, cold, lonely Tall Tree Valley, the things that people like me had been trying to push away with our cheerful chatter about how easy it was to find bucks, or how nice the bloody starflowers tasted.

Huddled up all wet and cold with a buckskin over my head to keep the snow off my hair, I thought about what it would
really
be like to stay forever under these lonely high trees, and deal with snows like this every couple of periods.

‘Yeah, you’ve got a point, John,’ I said. ‘Tall Tree Valley just doesn’t feel like a place where people are meant to live.’

Mehmet laughed angrily.

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, what
is
this? People lived on Earth in places where it snowed for wombs on end, Gela. Didn’t you know that? And as for you, John, what is your problem? You
know
this snow won’t last, and you know quite well we could manage it easy easy if we put our minds to it, with bigger fires and better shelters and thicker wraps. So what is it you’re trying to do? Are you
determined
to do for us all?’

I’d never liked Mehmet much, but I had to admit he was learning. He used just to moan at everything John did without offering another plan of his own, but now for the first time he was proposing something that could actually work. We
could
stay in Tall Tree. We
could
build stronger shelters. His hands were shaking and his voice was wobbly, but finally Mehmet was offering an alternative to John.

He didn’t have long to wait either for someone else to take his side.

‘No way am I going back up there where my sister died,’ said Dave Fishcreek. ‘And no way am I going to let you lead me anywhere again, John, not after what happened last time.’

His voice was shaking too. I’d tried a few times to point out to Dave and his brother Johnny that nobody made us go over to John from Family, and nobody forced us to follow John up onto Dark. I’d tried to point out that none of us could have have known that there was such a thing as snow leopards, and that John’s quick thinking had at least saved the rest of us from what happened to Suzie. I’d even tried reminding them Suzie was my friend, and that I loved her and grieved for her too, but she wasn’t the sort of person that would want them bitter bitter like this. But they’d never been willing to hear what I said.